Despite the state of high alert that accompanied the arrest of these musicians, the police only confiscated some hard rock and black metal CDs and some black T-shirts with pentagrams, skulls and inverted crosses. They also took some magazines such as Hard Rock, and posters for Western bands. The young men mostly did not understand the meaning of the English lyrics they sang. The songs they composed were about issues such as Palestine, the chaos of Casablanca and the difficulty of living on a low income.
One thing stood out in the information gathered here and there: all the young men, including Essam and Mahdi, frequented the same clubs as a group called the Ravens, so named because their members dressed all in black, including black leather overcoats and black combat boots. The Ravens wore metal sleeves around their wrists and rings with pointed claws, and had their ears, noses and eyebrows pierced. They adopted sullen expressions and went to all the clubs and cafés high on drugs or alcohol, accompanied by young women with strange names and who wore low-slung pants that revealed their navels and a large part of their hips.
The leader of the Ravens was a man called the Vampire. He organised parties at his house, where he reiterated some of the ideas found in black metal songs, such as mocking Jesus, encouraging sexual freedom, and advocating pleasure, violence and death. But that was not a call for anybody to join in devil worship. It was simply a form of exhibitionism that sometimes prompted him to take his friends to a nearby cemetery and organise a drinking session around a plastic skull with a candle stuck in it. He was once accompanied by a girl called Bish Bish, and he encouraged her to kiss Essam in the presence of his friends and then lie with him on a grave and move in time to a noisy song in imitation of sexual intercourse.
Mahdi avoided talking about this time, probably because he was not fully involved in the groups’ activities then, and possibly because he knew things he did not want to reveal. Fatima believed that the developments no one knew about were those that took place during Essam’s friendship with the Vampire. No one knew how far the cemetery nights went, or the nature of the relationships between Bish Bish and Essam, and Bish Bish and the Vampire.
Joaquin concluded that it was not inconceivable that Essam had been the victim of one of the devil worshippers’ rituals, thanks to direct instigation by the Vampire. It was also possible that this ritual had combined with a settlement of scores based on jealousy, revenge and even simple goading under the influence of alcohol and music. I tried to address those assumptions by eliminating the elements of prurience and exaggeration that were normal in this case. My words upset Fatima once more, and she answered me nervously, claiming that the fixation with incriminating Ibrahim al-Khayati was a political solution.
When I smiled at her, she said grimly, ‘Yes, like I’m saying. The decision to downplay the seriousness of the case and release the guys who were arrested came after the media frenzy, the questions in parliament and the solidarity demonstrations. This explains why they couldn’t go back and make it serious again by putting a murder at the heart of it. True? Right?’
‘If you say so,’ I replied.
That same evening we went back to the subject in Layla’s presence. She poked fun at Fatima and Joaquin’s theory, stressing — somewhat hastily I thought — that it was preferable for Essam to have been killed by Ibrahim and possibly buried in the garden, as the police believed.
I didn’t know how it happened, but later I found Fatima crying bitterly. Anxiety had settled in our midst and controlled everything. I could not calm Fatima. Her crying fit took over her whole body and reached such a pitch that she paralysed us all; we could not do a thing for her. Layla convinced us, with unusual calm, that the best thing to do was to let the fit run its course.
Once we got in the car Fatima had regained her composure. She sat next to me and apologised for what had happened, saying, ‘I don’t usually collapse like a child. The point is that I find Ibrahim al-Khayati’s case painful. It hurts me if he did it and it hurts me if he did not. It hurts me because he smiles like an idiot and asks me if I visited Mahdi and whether he has said anything, and why no one visits him and why Ghaliya does not visit him the way she did with the others in the old days. It hurts me that we accepted what happened as if it had to happen and moved on to something else as if we were not ourselves or as if the others were not themselves. Then what? What next? I return to a city that I know but find insipid; I find myself in an apartment like a teenager’s. I feed a colleague, just a colleague who won’t become anything more. There’s friction with Layla, so sure of herself, happy with what she does, and you, I put you especially in the position of bringing me back to reason. What a shame. Why don’t we run away to Havana?’
‘You said it was too late.’
‘I’m talking about the Havana nightclub in Casablanca. It was the last nightclub Essam went to before he disappeared.’
I told her I had been there once with Mahdi and I did not think it a suitable place for us, just a vast bubble of unmelodic noise performed by unattractive people.
I stood in the hotel doorway facing Fatima. Joaquin next to us was like a child past his bedtime. The night was desolate. I looked into Fatima’s eyes, transparent after the tears. Then I moved close to her and kissed her on the lips.
She said, laughing, ‘That’s nice, even if too late!’
Layla’s sharp voice and rapid sentences woke me up at three in the morning. She wanted to know if Fatima was with me.
‘Why would I do that?’ I asked her.
‘I don’t know. I either felt it or dreamed about it.’
I replied sleepily, ‘Check for yourself. Do you see how tiny I look in this large bed? There is no woman here.’
She asked angrily, ‘Did you wish there were?’
‘No. I just want to sleep actually.’
Layla felt sorry for me and said, ‘Sleep well and sweet dreams.’ She was sorry for her behaviour and asked me if I did not want her to appear out of the phone, and I said yes. She then said she loved me.
Fatima and Joaquin went on collecting news from various sources about Essam’s relationship with the Vampire. They wanted to know if he had seduced Essam into some kind of satanic relationship that had brought him back, even after the court case and what was considered the betrayal of Arthritis. According to Fatima, this suspect relationship might have created the sort of dramatic tension that could lead to a crime. But when, two days later, I took her and her Spanish colleague to the airport, she had distanced herself from the story. She considered Ibrahim’s arrest before the trial a sensible measure as it would protect him from any foolish act on the part of Mahdi or his mother. She added that Ibrahim was totally convinced Essam had crossed to the other side and might now be in a training camp somewhere, a member of a sleeper cell. I shuddered when I heard her talk so casually about the issue, as if engaging in this tragic destiny was a simple possibility among many others.
I wanted to ask her not to pay any attention to that possibility and to keep up her correspondence with Ibrahim, to help him remain strong. I wanted to convince her to abandon the idea of publishing her investigation in the Spanish press, because of the anxiety some Moroccan officials experienced whenever something was published in the foreign press. I told myself that, after all, the investigation only had limited importance because it did not go beyond the buzz generated by that kind of trial.